Let's get physical

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By Marc Foster and Chris Apple, special to CNNSI.com

If anyone can give us a valid reason that penalty minutes should be valued in fantasy leagues and pools, we’d like to hear it. A quick survey of the major online pools out there shows that every one gives some form of credit for minutes served, and frankly, we don’t know why. If it’s to give some measure of value to a physical player, it’s the wrong way to do it. What’s the value of saying the magic words and going to the box for 10 minutes?

Early this summer a few of us got to thinking about this problem: How do you credit physical play using the right statistical measure? The answer came from Iain Fyffe, who’s currently serving as statistical apprentice to Society for International Hockey Research (SIHR, the equivalent to SABR for you baseball people) president Ernie Fitzsimmons.

In recent years, the NHL has added a few statistical categories that can help up determine the aggression value of a player. The first is hits, defined as a check that removes the opposing player from the puck. The second is takeaways, defined as removing the puck by use of the stick. So now we have a measure of aggression with the body and one with the stick.

But this aggression can go too far. Checks on players without possession are often called as obstruction or interference, or in more extreme cases boarding or charging. With the stick, you’ve got tripping, slashing, or worse. So why is it that pools and leagues use penalty minutes? Aren’t they measuring the wrong thing? A slugger who hits a lot of home runs often strikes out a lot, but we don’t see baseball pools and rotisserie leagues giving credit for those, do we?

After determining that hits themselves have virtually no statistical correlation to winning, Fyffe's original idea was to divide hits by penalty minutes. At the team level, the correlation with winning proved to be a respectable 0.38. The second step was to divide hits by times short-handed, thereby removing the effects of misconducts and other such unruly behavior. The correlation this time was 0.41, which is strong enough to show that disciplined aggression was an ingredient to winning. However, this only addressed bodily play, so we suggested that takeaways be added to hits, and the result was a correlation coefficient of 0.48.

Adding takeaways makes sense. The purpose of physical play is to gain (or retain) control of the puck, and this is measured statistically with hits and takeaways. Both measures record the same thing -- the change of possession -- through different means. Hits use the body and takeaways use the stick. In general, hits tend to be the more physical method. However, as we’ve seen in the past, when taken to the extreme, stick use is no less physical.

Now, there’s a bit of data manipulation to consider. Do we count all minor penalties and unmatched majors? Do we count the minutes earned from those penalties? Just exactly what figure do we consider for the denominator? We’ll leave that open for discussion, but for this column we’ve selected unmated minors for the player data and times short-handed for the team data.

20 Most Disciplined Players With at Least 20 Takeaways + Hits
through Sunday
Rank	Player	Team	Unmatched Minors	TK + Hits	DAP
1	Keith Tkachuk	STL	1	50	50.00
2	Scott Stevens	N.J.	1	50	50.00
3	Jarkko Ruutu	VAN	1	48	48.00
4	Radek Dvorak	NYR	1	42	42.00
5	Ladislav Benysek	MIN	1	41	41.00
6	Dallas Drake	STL	1	37	37.00
7	Tyler Wright	CBJ	1	37	37.00
8	Jamal Mayers	STL	1	33	33.00
9	Trent Klatt	VAN	2	64	32.00
10	Scott Pellerin	BOS	1	30	30.00
11	Brendan Morrison	VAN	1	29	29.00
12	Cory Stillman	STL	1	29	29.00
13	Ken Daneyko	N.J	1	27	27.00
14	Tommy Westlund	CAR	1	27	27.00
15	Alexander Mogilny	TOR	1	26	26.00
16	John Madden	N.J.	1	26	26.00
17	Kirk Muller	DAL	1	26	26.00
18	Daniel McGillis	PHI	2	49	24.50
19	Patrik Elias	N.J.	1	24	24.00
20	Sergei Brylin	N.J.	1	24	24.00
Unmatched minors -- Penalties that led to a powerplay for the opposing team. TK + Hits -- Takeaways plus hits DAP -- Disciplined Aggression Proxy, (TK+Hits)/Unmatched Minors

It’ll be curious to see how this works out at the end of the season. This column is an introduction to the method, and with limited season data, we clearly have a lot of outlier information due to the number of players with only one or two unmatched minors. We left players with no unmatched minors out of the analysis completely, though their data was incorporated for the team summaries.

20 Least Disciplined Players With at Least 20 Takeaways + Hits
through Sunday
Rank	Player	Team	Unmatched Minors	TK + Hits	DAP
1	Peter Bondra	WSH	14	28	2.00
2	Markus Naslund	VAN	9	20	2.22
3	Marek Malik	CAR	10	24	2.40
4	Sergei Gonchar	WSH	10	24	2.40
5	Brad May	PHX	11	27	2.45
6	Benoit Hogue	DAL	8	21	2.63
7	Brendan Shanahan	DET	10	27	2.70
8	Alex Tanguay	COL	8	22	2.75
9	Chris Clark	CGY	9	25	2.78
10	Martin Skoula	COL	9	25	2.78
11	Vincent Damphousse	S.J.	8	24	3.00
12	Sandis Ozolinsh	CAR	7	21	3.00
13	Matthieu Schneider	L.A	10	31	3.10
14	Gary Suter	S.J.	8	25	3.13
15	Chris Gratton	BUF	9	29	3.22
16	Keith Primeau	PHI	8	26	3.25
17	Mark Messier	NYR	8	26	3.25
18	Aaron Miller	L.A.	7	23	3.29
19	Claude Lemieux	PHX	10	33	3.30
20	Pascal Trepanier	COL	6	20	3.33
Unmatched minors -- Penalties that led to a powerplay for the opposing team. TK + Hits -- Takeaways plus hits DAP -- Disciplined Aggression Proxy, (TK+Hits)/Unmatched Minors

Again, we’re dealing with limited data, so I hope none of these players (or their fans) takes this analysis personally.

Team Discipline Rankings
through Sunday
Team	TK + Hits	TSh	DAP
N.J.	529	56	9.45
DAL	651	79	8.24
OTT	526	67	7.85
STL	548	72	7.61
NYR	701	97	7.23
PHI	424	59	7.19
TOR	536	75	7.15
NYI	549	77	7.13
VAN	694	99	7.01
CBJ	496	72	6.89
COL	532	81	6.57
BUF	432	66	6.55
CGY	535	82	6.52
NSH	452	73	6.19
S.J.	588	95	6.19
PHX	558	92	6.07
CAR	636	105	6.06
EDM	524	87	6.02
ANA	460	77	5.97
DET	522	90	5.80
L.A.	520	90	5.78
CHI	531	93	5.71
MTL	421	76	5.54
PIT	447	81	5.52
FLA	483	88	5.49
BOS	514	94	5.47
MIN	371	71	5.23
T.B.	354	69	5.13
ATL	388	77	5.04
WSH	420	89	4.72
TSh -- Times short-handed TK + Hits -- Takeaways plus hits DAP -- Disciplined Aggression Proxy, (TK+Hits)/Unmatched Minors)

There are some interesting outliers here. We know that undisciplined aggression is of no consequence if the team has strong penalty killing (and vice versa). So, while the Rangers and Devils rank high in disciplined play, they also happen to be the worst penalty killers in the league. Conversely, the Bruins appears undisciplined, but their penalty killing ranks third in the league. Obviously, this speaks to the idea that discipline (as a statistical concept) and special teams play may not be related, though we make that assertion without checking the correlation. We hesitate to speculate on less than quarter-season of data, but this is something that certainly warrants more scrutiny.

Marc Foster is a research analyst in Fort Worth, Texas. Chris Apple is a database analyst/Internet specialist in Lincoln, Neb. Together, they operate HockeyResearch.com, and hope to one day elevate statistical research in hockey to the level seen in other sports.

 

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